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About Andy Clark

My wife Shannon and I are the parents of two young kids. We live on the western edge of Cobb County, off County Line Road.

I was born at Northside Hospital in Atlanta and grew up in what’s now Johns Creek. My mom raised me and my sister, and my dad was a civil engineer.

I went to school at High Meadows in Roswell, then Marist in Brookhaven. I was Marist’s STAR Student and active in music and drama. If you saw a Marist football game in the early ’90’s, you probably saw me playing trombone.

For a while I left Georgia. (I’ve been to all 50 states.) I went to Rice University in Houston. I graduated in 1998 – the same year that Senate District 37 was last contested by a Democrat – and decided to become a lawyer. I then graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, as a Law Review member, in 2001. This was back when Barack Obama was just a law professor there.

I’ve been a lawyer now for 17 years, and in that time I’ve done a bit of everything. I worked for large law firms where I defended big corporations like Walmart and Bank of America. I was a law school professor myself at Tulane in New Orleans. I was there in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina came through.

For the last four years I’ve run my own law firm. My practice focuses on appeals. That means a party has won or lost in a trial court and the case gets appealed to a higher court. I’ve represented people who were injured by a doctor’s mistakes or by a corporation’s carelessness. I’ve represented parents fighting for custody of their children. I won a federal appeal against Cobb County Sheriff Neil Warren about conditions at the county jail. And I’m representing a small Baptist congregation in central Georgia, whose elderly members lost control of their church assets to a megachurch.

As I’ve gotten to see how our Court of Appeals works, how our Georgia Supreme Court works, I’ve learned a lot about politics in this state. Some Democrats will disagree with me, but as I see it, up until pretty recently, here in Georgia we haven’t had it that bad under Republican leadership. I didn’t vote for Sonny Perdue or Nathan Deal. But with a few big exceptions, they practiced a business-friendly sort of Republicanism. They wanted jobs for this state. To get jobs, they kept a lid on the more extreme forces in their party. Gov. Deal vetoed the so-called religious liberty legislation that social conservatives wanted to use to attack gay marriage. Gov. Perdue took heat for not restoring our old segregationist confederate state flag after Gov. Barnes had taken it away. It could have been a lot worse.

I’m afraid it’s about to get worse. The generation of Republicans like Nathan Deal, who started out as Democrats, and who were pragmatists, is riding off into the sunset. We saw a preview of what’s to come in what the legislature did with the Delta fuel tax exemption. Delta had a discount program for NRA members. In the whole history of the program, it was only ever used by 13 people. It was a trivial thing. But after the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Delta decided to stop partnering with the NRA. Delta had been on the verge of getting back a tax break on jet fuel that’s worth $40 million a year. And the Republican-led legislature decided to take that break away to punish Delta.

Whatever you think of the NRA, whatever you think of special tax breaks for Delta, that’s not the way a state of 10.5 million people should be run. Gov. Deal to his credit came out and said so. It’s tribalism. It’s resentment politics. It’s culture war politics.

We ought to be basing our policies on facts. We ought to be basing our policies on what works for everyday Georgians.

My 15-Point Agenda for West Cobb and Georgia

Better Healthcare

1. Provide medical coverage for hundreds of thousands of uninsured Georgians (including 30,000 in Cobb County alone), create thousands of new jobs, and start bringing $3 billion/year of our own tax money back from Washington by accepting Medicaid expansion.

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Gun Safety

2. Strengthen gun safety with universal background checks and an Extreme Risk Protection Order (or “red-flag”) law, while respecting individuals’ Second Amendment rights to own and carry firearms.

Paid Medical Leave

4. Guarantee 8 weeks of paid family medical leave — paid for by the state, not the employer — for anyone working who needs time off for the birth of a child or to care for a sick family member.

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Higher Wages

5. Raise the state minimum wage to $10.10/hour, and start indexing it to rise automatically with inflation, while letting local governments set their own even higher rates.

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Tax Credit for Working

6. Pass the Georgia Work Credit – a state version of the Earned Income Tax Credit – that rewards work and gives lower-wage earners a path to the middle class.

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Legal Marijuana

7. Legalize recreational and medical marijuana, which would reduce opioid overdose deaths, let law enforcement focus on violent crime and property crime, make money for the state, and respect individuals’ rights to make their own choices.